The camera interface is pretty simple, yet packed with features like HDR shots, face detection and Group mode, as well as a number of scene presets. It sports a rich number of pic and video effects, and a very entertaining face distortion regime, where you can choose from six warping effects to apply on your friends' faces.

Camera interface

The pictures from the 8MP module with dual LED flash are nothing breathtaking, but it came out as a decent camera nonetheless, especially when we consider the zero shutter lag and Burst shot modes made possible by the Android ICS camera API and the fast dual-core processor.

Outdoor samples taken with the Huawei Ascend P1

Strong

Medium

Low light

Darkness with flash

Indoor samples

The colors are a bit colder and photos often get overexposed, overshadowing a good level of detail and decent sharpness without much noise. You can up the contrast and saturation one notch in the settings for more eye-appealing results.

The 1080p video capture looks again a bit bland in terms of color representation, but it takes in a decent level of detail and is recorded with smooth 30fps, plus you get a somewhat nervous continuous autofocus.

Huawei Ascend P1 Sample Video:

Huawei Ascend P1 Indoor Sample Video:

Multimedia:

As we said, the music player is stock ICS with some equalizers and sound modes, and Huawei only added Music+, provided that you want to run your music from categorized folders with some fancier visualizations.

The handset features the Dolby Mobile technology, which works in loudspeaker mode as well, but since the unit itself is pretty average in terms of sound output, it doesn't do much good unless you plug in a pair of quality headphones.

The music player

The video player doesn't cover DivX/Xvid files out of the box, only runs them with software acceleration, so you'd have to hit the Play Store for those. MPEG-4s play up to 1080p without a hitch. Google's own Movie Studio app is provided to take care of video editing, if needed.

This is a very capable phone for power users and it got stock ICS with a pentaband 3G frequency how many phones currently in the market can boast of that? Apart from the limited internal memory and a high price of 500bucks this indeed is a well buit and equipped phone....Good job Huawei atleast when your newer and higher end phones with HD resolution are released later on this year it be able to compete with the likes of the SAMSUNG GALAXY S iii and the HTC ONE X....

Nice Review, nice phone - if the price drops I'll surely consider it for a buy!
One question: I see the mcro-SD slot is externally accessible... can you change the SD card without shutting down the phone? USB OTG would also be nice to know...

@avivaus: Flash ist still available, but Adobe is withdrawing the app from the play store (I think July 15th - so very soon!) and will not support Android 4.1 / Jelly Bean. But this apply to any Android phone!

@eekiguy: Thanks for your reply. What a pity about OTG, but you're right, the microSD slot partly makes up for that. I might start using microSD cards in my camaera, so I can bump these into the phone and send some shots home ;-)

Here in Europe it's still at ~385 EUR, that's >450USD :-(
Still a very nice phone :)
(I'm planning to review it against Xperia P and One S on www.technoviel.de, but wait for confirmation on the test units)

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